I’ve finished the first command stand for the Evil Chinese army - The Court of the Chaos Queen.
Really enjoyed painting these figures and found 25s a nice change after painting so many 15mm Indians.
I’m basing everything on double size 15mm bases (so 80mm wide) and doubling the 15mm distances - as suggested to me by Steve Dean. I think the bases look a lot better than cramming everything in on an 80mm base.
I’ve realised that I am never going to stick to one project at the moment - I get so little time to paint that I’m happy just painting whatever catches my fancy at that time. This means that I am currently working on at least three projects:
1) Classical Indian Army for Field of Glory. I have just finished the initial batch of 72 archers for this; all based and finished.
The next batch will be the 9 Elephants (including generals) which I am about halfway through.
2) Gangsters. No more progress made on the buildings, but I now have the matchsticks for window ledges and cornices required to finish the roof.
3) HOTT armies. I’m planning on building 2 25mm HOTT armies using the Tales of the Dragon Kings range. So far I have got about 2/3rds of the first command stand finished…
It has been nearly two years since I have posted something here which has really been due to lack of time and the work that has gone into Black Hat Miniatures since I bought Gladiator Games from Bill and Elaine Lucas in August 2006.
I have been running it one and then two days a week whilst also working and whilst also suffering from M.E./CFS which still hasn’t gone away, though it has improved some what. In that time I have found that I have almost no time to paint anything other than display figures, that I don’t have the space to plan any large games projects now that my games room is now my workshop and that I have had very little to report about personal hobby projects…
I have been very lucky to still have Guildford Wargames Club to play at each Monday, so I am still getting regular games in.
I have been playing a big mix of periods and stules over the last couple of years without really managing to start much that is new. I have finished enough Normans now to field a WAB army and started on some Vikings, I have also added to the Saxons and War of the Roses armies. I have still not finished the Scouring of the Shire project, though it is almost finished with about 12 figures left to paint and some hobbit holes to make.
However, as of next week I will be running Black Hat Miniatures 4 days a week and doing 1 day a week consultancy work. This should mean that I have more time to devote to my own wargames hobby interests as well as the purely commercial ones of Black Hat.
To this end, I have started working on some Copplestone Gangsters and today started building the first building to go along with them.
Couple of quick photos here:
I am hoping to use this blog to comment on a few things, track my painting again and document the building of the gangsters project…
Of course, the moment I post about concentrating on a project I get distracted from it by getting some stock of our new Superhero and Fantasy ranges and deciding to paint some of the Superheroes for Display.
I think that they came out very well. I’ve painted them up as belonging to the same super team.
More pictures here
I have painted very little over the last month and gamed very little due to illness (I have a recurrent viral problem that brings on myalgia) and also due to work, Black Hat Miniatures taking up my time and so on.
I have finally started to paint again and have decided to take a leaf out of another fellow Woking resident’s book, Matakashi, and to work on a set project.
I have a fair amount of Games Workshop Lord of the Rings figures and most of the supplements but have been collecting and painting fairly haphazardly. I have now decided to concentrate on building up all the forces to play all the scenarios in the Scouring of Shire supplement.
It has the advantage of requiring relatively few figures and has some very fun scenarios in it.
I have started by painting up 8 hobbit archers. Pictures and details of the project to come on on the Scouring of the Shire project page in the next week.
Just uploaded some pictures of the Perry Pilgrims I have finished..
I’ve been neglecting updating this blog lately. It is mostly because I have been busy on a variety of other websites.
As I use computers all day in the “real world”, I try to avoid spending too much time in front of one updating websites once I get home.
The major update I have been working on is for the Black Hat Miniatures website where I have added an online shop using Cube Cart. This has come about because I decided to sell my own figures directly rather than through Fighting15s as the range was now large enough to stand on its own.
Fighting15s and Ian have done a very good job selling the figures since I started Black Hat back in 2004, but the plan was always to eventually sell the figures directly once I had the time and the ranges to warrant it. Ian and I are still doing shows together and will next be at Valhalla in Farnborough on the 18th June.
The other web work has been overhauling the Guildford Wargames website into a format that other members of the club can easily update as I no longer have the time to maintain and update the site by myself.
Apart from that, we attended Salute and had a very good show. It was very well run - can’t comment on the show from a punter’s point of view as I didn’t get any chance to wander around after it opened, but as a trader I thought it was excellent.
My painting has slowed down a little, but I am working on some pilgrims at the moment (Perry Miniatures and Black Tree Designs) for the Doryleaum SOA battle day that our club is running 3 games at.
The season of wargames shows has started and I’ve already attended two shows over the last few weeks.
The first of these as Call to Arms in Theale, near Reading, run by the Newbury and reading Wargames Club.
We arrived at 9am to discover that the organisers weren’t expecting us as they hadn’t received the cheque for the stall – not an auspicious start to the day! Fortunately, they were very good at shifting round tables and we ended up with a table in the entrance area, meaning that everyone that came in saw us. Subsequently, we discovered at least two other traders who had sent in cheques that hadn’t arrived, so something had clearly gone wrong somewhere…
The show is small, with only about 200-250 people through the door, but it had a good atmosphere , the games were interesting and there was a good mix of traders. The people there seemed keen to part with their money and Ian Marsh (of Fighting15s) and I were pleasantly surprised by our level of sales.
The second show of the year was Cavalier. Like Call to Arms, this is a show I had attended as a punter for the first time last year and was returning as a trader. It is run by Tunbridge Wells Wargames Society and they were some of the friendliest and most helpful people I’ve yet met at a show. We had a queue of people waiting to help us unload and load again which made the process very easy.
The show had a larger number of traders than Call to Arms and some bigger names as well, with about 450 people through the doors over the course of the day. Although there was a lot of interest from people, they didn’t seem to be spending as much as at Call to Arms, with a lot of enquiries about whether we would be at Salute. It seemed that a lot of people were planning their Salute spending rather than spending on the day.
It was a fun show though, and we were next to Julian from Chiltern Miniatures, who we are neighbours with at Warfare, so spent the day chatting to him and Steven from Little Big Men Studios.
The next show on the horizon is the big one – Salute and we are already busy planning what stock to take, trying to get some new releases done and hoping that we can bring enough of the right stock on the day.
Remember, if you can pre-order then please do- for both our sakes! 
I have updated my Painting Totals page, which shows that last year was a pretty good year for getting some of the unpainted mountain done and on the table. The figures for 15mm are high due to the large number of Martian Empires figures painted for the demo at Valhalla in June.
I also expect to paint about the same number of Napoleon in Egypt figures this year in order to play some test games of Huzzah!
I haven’t started the year that well with only 36 figures painted (all Martian Guard - 16 to go to complete the units), but I have been spending time whipping the Martian Empires rules into shape ahead of laying them out for publication. They are very nearly there and I’ll be able to relax after they are done…
I have also been having a small clearout of my games room and have decided that it is time to sell the rules that I have collected over the years that I am never going to play, thus there is a For Sale page up now listing the rules I want to sell on.
I also intend to have a small clearout of figures that I have accumulated for some projects that I am no longer keen on using or know that I will never get around to painting and using. These will probably go onto ebay at some point…
Better late than never – happy new year! Despite my resolution to update this blog more regularly, I’ve failed already and can hardly believe that its nearly the end of January.
I played the first game of the year at the club and it brought back memories of games in the dingy basement of Fun and Games in Woking nearly ten years ago. In those days it was Napoleonics, usually 1812 French vs Russians, using Eaglebearer with little 12 man columns zipping around the table. This time, it was Revolutionary period game of French vs Austrians in 1792 and a refight of Quaregnon using Iron Duke, the Computer Strategies of Australia Computerised rules.
The Revolutionary Wars is a period that really interests me, and one that I think is sadly neglected by Napoleonic players in favour of the 1812+ period when the French have started to lose their abilities and the British are on the rise.
Not that the French in 1792 are much good, as demonstrated by our rather poor showing and the loss of a lot of our troops as we failed to throw the Austrians out the town they occupied.
The rules seemed to work pretty well and have the advantage, like all computerised rules, of hiding the true picture of your troops condition from your view. They also handle things such as the slow unlimbering of large batteries (the Austrian 12-pounders took 3 turns) which is difficult to track in a normal game.
There is a 1792 campaign in the offing at the club, as soon as our current Napoleonic Campaign has finished. Not that, as the Saxons I am doing that well in that campaign either and I think the rules will work well.
I must admit though, that I miss rolling the dice….